But it’s a temporary thing, only until I finish his latest book, Fish Won’t Let Me Sleep — Obsessions of a Lifelong Flyfisherman. Mr. Babb is one of the most entertaining writers in the fish-lit genre, and that’s saying a lot because ever since Dame Juliana Berners’s Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle emerged in […]

I quit smoking cigarettes many years ago. I quit cold turkey one day while serving in Vietnam and never remotely craved another cigarette. Don’t ask me how I accomplished that but it was possibly the best thing I ever did for myself. Nowadays the only time I burn — not smoke — tobacco is when […]

In the first installment of the Foreign Entanglements series I related that I was inspired to try to go trout fishing in Afghanistan in 1987, despite the Soviet occupation of the country, upon hearing rumors that a “crazy French doctor” did exactly that every year. A few years ago I wrote about my failed attempt […]

Let’s get one thing straight: the Brook Trout, salvelinus fontinalis, is the most beautiful fish on the planet. I’ve believed that ever since catching my first one, on a worm, in a shady pool of the Oyster River at the edge of the Bog, off Beechwood Street in Warren. The worm had been liberated from […]

It’s useful to keep a fishing log, or angling diary, if you don’t succumb to angleritis and stretch, push, pull and hammer reality into a better story. An honest accounting of the day’s fishing — which many people believe that we, as a class, are incapable of — can be instructive as well as humbling […]